The Emmys Are... Still Boring

There's almost never anything very interesting to say about the Emmy Awards. It's not even really their fault — it's true of just about every awards show. So let me say something that may not come as a surprise: The 2013 Emmy nominations, announced this morning, are as boring as they've ever been. Some critics, including Willa Paskin at Slate, have commented that the Emmys upper their game this year and are now spotlighting more quality programming than ever. And in a superficial sense, that's true:

The Emmys' choices are those of a recognizably dedicated and serious TV watcher: someone who really loves Veep, despised the Kalinda husband plot on The Good Wife, appreciates Top of the Lake and Mandy Patinkin and Louie C.K., adores Connie Britton in perpetuity, knows Scandal is buzzy, and has yet to get around to watching Parenthood or The Americans (but probably intends to). The Emmys are a person you could talk TV with at a dinner party.

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But that may be the most damning thing you could say about this year's Emmys: The nominations read like they were made by someone who attends lots of dinner parties. It's true that in the old days the Emmys tended toward network fare and only occasionally went out of their way to champion an acclaimed cable or premium-cable contender (The Sopranos). Now, instead of genuinely seeking out great TV, they seem to have reversed their selection formula for our modern, more "sophisticated" sensibilities. The nominations fawn over just about anything that's been hotly discussed among TV critics in the past year — Girls, The Newsroom, Louie — with the occasional bone thrown to a mass-audience network comedy (hello, Modern Family). The Emmys desperately want to prove themselves an A-student watcher of "buzzy" TV.

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Nowhere is this more obvious than in the deluge of nominations for Netflix, the newcomer here. I don't know what rejiggering of the rules, if any, was required to accommodate the sole Internet TV channel with Kevin Spacey on its payroll, but I do know House of Cards is exactly what the the Emmys love and have always loved. It's moody, it has famous people and snappy dialogue, it's sort of about politics but doesn't require you to know the basic functions of Congress, it's really about whom everybody's sleeping with, and it doesn't leave the viewer with any icky, morally complicated feelings. Ten years ago it would've been called The West Wing. The only difference now is you watch it on your computer.